THE ELEMENTS OF SETTING
THE ELEMENTS OF SETTING THE ELEMENTS OF SETTING 1. Time • General Period • • Season • • Day and Night • • Duration • • Place • • Local Color • • Occupations • • Conditions • • The Setting Entire • THE ELEMENTS OF SETTING As we now consider the four elements of setting — Time, Place, Occupations and Conditions — remember that two or more of these will produce what is loosely called background; that is, that part of the setting which is introduced for the purpose of " bringing out " the characters, whether by means of harmony or of contrast. It is this background, bold or obscure, clear-cut or subtly suggested, that is so potent to charm the reader when it is worked in with a deft and well considered touch. No other phase of the story-teller's art is so alluring and fascinating as that which causes the characters to play in activity, or reveal their intricate yet sharply defined motives, upon the chosen background. Here is the fairest field for observation. You remember that Flaubert counseled his pupil Maupassant to look at an object until he saw in it all that Everyone else saw, and then continue to look until he saw what no one else saw. This applies not only to analytical observation but to constructive observation as well. Lessing inquires : " How do we obtain a clear idea of a thing in space? First we observe its separate parts, then the union of these parts, and finally the whole. Our senses perform these various operations with such amazing rapidity as to make them seem but one. This rapidity is absolutely essential to our obtaining an idea of the whole, which is nothing more than the result of the conception of the parts and of their connection with each other. " 14 So we must regard each of these elements as only a part of the greater fact — the entire setting. 1. Time Here we have an idea broad and effective, more or less openly influencing every story. The author may flatly announce the two elements of time — the period of his story, and its duration ; or he may ignore both ; or he may merely suggest these conditions; or he may gradually make both period and duration plain as the story proceeds. (a)The general period will be future, present-day, or /past. The whole range of history lies before you for choice, and woe to you if you set twentieth-century people to performing against a Roman background, in Greek costumes, while speaking in Medieval phrases ! Choose no period that you do not know or cannot master, unless you do not fear the rejection slip. Even a year makes a revolutionary difference in setting when that year is 1534 in England, ?WI in America, or 187o in France. For another example, it is worthwhile, if your swashbucklers engage in swordplay, to know in what period duelists held poniards in their left hands, and in what period cloaks. Mannerisms of speech, of dress, of sport, of gaming — a whole world of detail — rest upon time in the setting, for time influences place, occupation, and conditions. Season, too, must not be forgotten, with its pageantry of color and its peculiar chain of limitations. Either keep birds and flowers out of your picture or have them sing and bloom in season. Do not be a " nature faker " in fiction. Day and night offer pitfalls for the unwary. Goethe once complained that in describing Ivanhoe's entrance into Cedric's great dining hall, Scott was too minute in recording details, for he showed even Ivanhoe's shoes, which could not really be noticed by night in the gloom of that vast apartment. " If Sidney Lanier 18had ever noted carefully the time setting of the climax in Silas Magner, he could not have written of ' a ray of sunshine striking through the window and illuminating the little one's head. ' " 15 What simplicity and sublimity mingle in the setting established by the opening lines of Tappan's exquisite hymn, in which spirit and background harmonize so perfectly : 'Tis midnight; and on Olive's brow The star is dimmed that lately shone: 'Tis midnight ; in the garden, now, The suffering Saviour prays alone. (d)Duration of timeis not less important, though less prominent, than period. Many an unwary author has slipped on the simple matter of forgetting that it takes time to travel here, there, and back again; that people normally grow older with the lapse of years ; and that events must be consistent with the procession of the seasons. Even the many-eyed proofreader overlooks some glaring inconsistencies of time duration in stories. In " Ouida's " idyllic pastoral, " A Leaf in the Storm, " u Reine Allix is in her ninety-third year before her grandson Bernadou proposes to Margot, and the aged dame is still ninetythree after Bernadou is accepted, is married, and has become the father of a boy then more than a year old I 2. Place Since Julius Caesar has reminded us that certain tribes " differ among themselves in languages, customs, and laws, " we must observe how important a part place plays in the setting. The author may propose to locate his story " nowhere in particular "—and then that is what his setting will resemble. Not that he need announce the name of country, section, and town, but he himself must know it, or mentally construct it, and be faithful to its local color. How many stories come to the manuscript reader’s desk (they seldom reach the editor-in-chief) the settings of which bring to mind Artemus Ward's naive confession as to one of the figures on his panorama : " I can conceal it from you no longer — it is a horse ! " Their Parisians should be labeled, for their surroundings might equally well be those of Berlin or of Petersburg. A cowboy must be such in more than name to be convincing. Paolo Veronese dressed the people in his painting The Marriage at Cana, in the clothes of his day. It was a tour de force, and what did he gain? Local color cannot be dreamed out. If you have not visited and studied the locality of which you write, at least consult a book or a friend, and even then you are liable to go wrong. No African traveler would ever recognize the background of Johnson's Rasselas. A meritorious instance in point is found in the following introduction to Harold MacGrath's novelette, The Princess Elopes. The atmosphere, the names, the customs, the color, are all German, yet the grand-duchy and the principality are imaginary. The setting conforms not to unchecked imagination but to the imagined reality. It is rather difficult in these days for a man who takes such scant interest in foreign affairs—trust a whilom diplomat for that l— to follow the continual geographical disturbances of European surfaces. Thus, I cannot distinctly recall the exact location of the Grand Duchy of Barscheit, or of the neighboring principality of Doppelkinn. It meets my needs and purposes however, to say that Berlin and Vienna were easily accessible, and that a three hours' journey would bring you under the shadow of the Carpathian Range, where, in my diplomatic days, I used often hunt the "bear that walks like a man. " Manifestly, it is much easier to write of a specific locality than of a general place — if there be such a thing. For example, set your scene in North America ; now contract the setting to the United States, to the East, to Pennsylvania, to eastern Pennsylvania, to the anthracite coal regions, to Pittston, to the foreign quarter — and as you narrow down the place your pictures increase in vividness and in suggestiveness both to you and to your reader. In passing, let me say that the same idea applies to the use of specific words for painting in the local color of a community. Which of these two pictures is the clearer ? " The man was lying on a rock near the large frame house ;" " The gardener sprawled on a granite boulder a few yards to the left of the rambling, clapboarded house " ? Generality in the former sentence has been individualized in the latter. Local color demands precise words. Not that Description is a matter of mere words. It is not. It consists rather of calling things by their most precise and simple names, and noting their individualities, that they may be distinguished from all generally similar objects. It is not words, primarily, but ideas with words exactly fitted to them, that make delineation vivid. Once or twice I have used here an expression which is current among those who speak and write of fiction — " local color. " What does it connote in the language of criticism ? Mr. James Lane Allen says : " A friend of mine — a painter — had just finished reading some little thing that I had succeeded in having published in the Century. ' What do you think of it ? ' I asked him. ' Tell me frankly what you like and what you don't like. ' " It's interestingly told, dramatic, polished, and all that, Allen, ' was his reply, ' but why in the world did you neglect such an opportunity to drop in some color here, and at this point, and there ? ' " It came over me like that, " said the Kentuckian, snapping his fingers, " that words indicating colors can be manipulated by the writer just as pigments are by the painter. I never forgot the lesson. And now when I describe a landscape, or a house, or a costume, I try to put it in such words that an artist can paint the scene from my words. " " This is local color. " Local color must be presented pervasively, not in chunks. It must touch everything in the story that would naturally be influenced by local conditions —language, customs, costumes, and all the rest, and it must keep on coloring them, never for a moment allowing the people to speak out of " character, " act out of consistency, or break away from the requisite environment. In " Ouida's " " A Leaf in the Storm, " the author gives the local setting thus progressively. The picture of the quaint Normandy village, Berceau de Dieu, grows clearer as the story moves on. It is nearly half told when we see Reine Allix — " A tall and strong woman, very withered and very bent and very brown, yet with sweet, dark, flashing eyes that had still light (sic) in them, and a face that was still noble, though nearly a century had bronzed it with its harvest suns and blown on it with its wintry winds" at night by her window in the roof and meditating on the wedding of her grandson Bernadou, just accomplished. "From her lattice in the eaves she saw straight up the village street; saw the dwellings of her lifelong neighbors, the slopes of the rich fields, the gleam of the broad, gray water, the whiteness of the crucifix against the darkened skies. " The ability to reproduce the temper and tone of a wide locality has built up a school of present-day writers whose very names suggest to the magazine reader their chosen sections. Will N. Harben has spoken for northern Georgia, " Charles Egbert Craddock " for the Tennessee mountains, Hamlin Garland for the northwestern farm-country, Mary Wilkins Freeman for humble life in New England, James Lane Allen for Kentucky, Elsie Singmaster for the Pennsylvania Germans, George W. Cable for Louisiana, Thomas Nelson Page for Virginia, and —not to extend further a list to which many other excellent names at home and abroad might be added of those whose work rivals the best — each of these has found in his characteristic local conditions an appealing quality that has enriched the American short-story. A useful device for helping the author to visualize his locale is to prepare a topographical map of the entire physical setting, something after the fashion of the au thors ofTreasure Island, The Forest Lovers, and Quincy Adams Sawyer. Not all writers would wish to publish the map, but an exact sketch would at least help to keep the movements of the characters in the place consistent and realistic. • Occupations • The setting not only influences the characters in what they are, but in what they do. Contrariwise, what the characters are doing in a story will govern the setting. The two must be consistent. A football game argues the " gridiron, " with eleven men on each team and not nine, as a writer had it in a recent story. A whole vocabulary of technical terms must be at the pen's point — terms of business, of sport, of social life, and of endless other special occupations — in order to a faithful presentment of local color. I know of no fault so prevalent, and so hopeless, as the efforts of the tyro to describe occupations with which he has not made himself familiar. • Conditions • I have said that this is not a satisfactory word. No more is " environments. " By it I mean all the conditions — moral, mental, spiritual, emotional, physical, social — all the conditions which are conceived of by the author as limiting the actors in their working out of the story. Some have called it the " mood " of the story, but it is something more than mood. And these surrounding, all-pervading, penetrating conditions must be so sketched in that the reader may be able to measure all the handicaps which work for and against the characters before they start, and while they are doing or becoming. When " place " and " conditions " are handled carefully together some fine harmonies and contrasts result. The gloomy setting prepares for the catastrophe, as in Poe's " The Fall of the House of Usher ; " or the calm after the storm fits in with the mood of selfrenunciation after years of struggle. In The Last Days of Pompeii the eruption of Vesuvius is in harmony with the mood of the story, as is the case with the burning of Rome in Quo Vadis, its weaker successor. See the perfect concord of mood and setting in this passage from James Lane Allen's The Choir Invisible: The next morning the parson, standing a white cold shepherd before his chilly wilderness flock, preached a sermon from the text: "I shall go softly all my years. " While the heads of the rest were bowed during the last moments of prayer, she rose and slipped out. "Yes, " she said to herself, gathering her veil closely about her face as she alighted at the door of her house and the withered leaves of November were whirled fiercely about her feet, "I shall go softly all my years. " But the conditions may strongly contrast with the mood of the action. To quote again from " Ouida's " " A Leaf in the Storm " One evening in this gracious and golden time the people sat out as usual when the day was done, talking from door to door, the old women knitting or spinning, the younger ones mending their husbands' or brothers' blouses or the little blue shirts of their infants, the children playing with the dogs on the sward that edged the stones of the street, and above all the great calm !leavens and the glow of the sun that had set. Reine Allix, lilce the others, sat before the door, for once doing nothing, but with folded hands and bended head dreamily taking pleasure in the coolness that had come with evening— Suddenly there came along the road between the trees an old man and a mule; it was Mathurin the miller—He paused before the cottage of Reine Allix; he was dusty, travel-stained, and sad. Margot ceased laughing among her flowers as she saw her old master. None of them knew why, yet the sight of him made the air seem cold and the night seem near. "There is terrible news, " he said, drawing a sheet of printed words from his coat-pocket —" terrible news! We are to go to war. " 5. The Setting Entire In the ardent effort to secure individual effects, do not overlook the unity of the whole setting. Keep ever in mind Poe's dictum regarding unity of impression. Let the setting constitute a complete scene, a unified picture, clean-cut or hazy, as you please, but nevertheless as effectively set forth as are " good deeds in a naughty world. " Setting, in proper harmony or contrast with the plot, will produce convincing work. Then the characters will march toward their destinies with an air of fitness as admirable as it is rare. The storm breaks when the hero's moral tension is at its height. The grisly night prompts the trembling weakling to forswear his evil purposes. The breaking clouds seem to clear up the doubts of the beleaguered soul. Does not all the environment goad Macbeth steadily on to his crime and its doom, just as her surroundings happily conduct Portia to her joy? Hawthorne hedges Donatello about with a setting — conditions past and present — which makes his crime inevitable, and all his afterlife shares in the same tragic sequence. The skillful dramatist shows the soul in its hour of crisis poised ready for either course. And all the circumstance of music and form and color and air and word combine to move the will to its resolve. Then, when once that resolve is taken, and the deed is accomplished, the setting falls quietly into its new grooves to fit the man in his new mood. Category:Setting